Dreams of another day, p.4
Dreams of Another Day, page 4
‘Because much as I’d like to, I don’t love you,’ she said by way of introduction. At the expression on his face, she felt impelled to add: ‘I like you enormously, but there isn’t any more to it than that.’
‘I see,’ said Mark.
He took his hand away. Ming winced; her instincts always ordered her to agree, to accept and to please people, but for once she disobeyed. ‘I don’t seem able to feel more than liking: not just for you but for everyone,’ she said, trying to make him understand so that he would be less hurt.
‘It’s as though something was left out of my character … perhaps there was some bad fairy at my christening.’ She smiled, but there was neither amusement nor pleasure in her eyes.
Mark was watching her face again, his grey eyes intent and worried but not at all angry. When she stopped speaking, he said:
‘I don’t think any of that’s true. You seem to me to be capable of enormous affection.’
‘It’s an illusion: all part of the bad fairy’s gift,’ Ming answered. She had never told anyone else what she really felt and was surprised at how difficult she found it.
‘I can be kind to people and look after them, listen to them and mind about them, and they think that’s love, but it isn’t. I have tried to get it right and I can’t. I feel as though – at thirty-one – I’ve only just discovered that I’m seriously handicapped.’
Mark sat in silence for a while, but then he stood up and walked round the pale grey table to hold out both hands to Ming, saying with determined cheerfulness:
‘Handicapped or not, you’re much the nicest person I know. Even if we can’t be married we can still be friends, can’t we?’
Ming accepted his hands and let him pull her up out of the red chair.
‘I’d like it so much, but would you really?’
‘Yes, Ming, I would like it.’ He put one of his hands to her cheek. ‘I’d be a fool to lose you – on whatever terms you set.’
She was astonished by his generosity and filled with gratitude. As though to prove that he could keep within the bounds of friendship, Mark insisted on staying to help her with the washing up.
When he had gone Ming retrieved the four pieces of Roger Sillhorne’s unread letter from the waste-paper basket, extracted the letter itself from the envelope and pieced it together.
‘Ming,
I can’t accept your prohibition on letters. We worked together for eight years and I’ve asked you to marry me. You owe me more than a cold letter telling me to leave you alone. If you felt like that why did you lead me to think that you wanted me? Why did you always smile at me and pretend? It’s bloody unfair.
‘I miss you so much. Your successor smells of cheap face powder and can’t deal with the constituents as you could. She’s lazy and slummocky and I dislike her. Come back, Ming. If you won’t marry me, at least come back to the office. I need you.
R.
The contrast between the two men could not have been more marked if they had belonged to different species. Mark’s generosity gave Ming the confidence to tell Roger Sillhorne for the first time exactly what she meant:
Dear Roger,
My smiling at you in the office never constituted an invitation. I smile at bus conductors, too.
Your asking me to marry you gives you no rights over me.
My having worked for you for eight years gives you no rights over me either. You paid for my work. You did not pay for my lifelong devotion. It is not for sale.
I have told you that I cannot marry you. You and the constituency will have to find an alternative wife. Please do not write any more letters to me. If you do, I shall not read them.
Ming Alderbrook
She put the letter in an envelope, addressed and stamped it, and then burned Roger’s in the empty grate. In all her life she had never been so blunt with anyone and she found herself shaking. But she decided that Connie was right: there was no immutable law that said that she had to swallow everything everyone else said to her and never show what it did to her.
On that thought, she went to deal with her unpacking, washing her stockings and sorting the rest of her clothes for the laundry and the dry cleaner’s. For some reason she had always hated writing laundry lists and was half tempted to leave that chore to Mrs Crook, but she made herself do it and packed everything up in the laundry box for the van driver to collect on the following Monday morning.
When everything was in its place, Ming took the sheaves of notes she had written in Egypt back to her desk and set about trying to batter them into the shape of an article for Connie.
A week later she had rewritten the resulting piece six times and was still unhappy with it. In despair she telephoned Connie’s partner, Max Hillary, and asked whether she could talk to him about it. She did not know him well, but, having read what he had written in the magazine, she was prepared to trust his judgement.
‘Of course,’ he said down the telephone. ‘Any time. I’d love to see you. Connie says your cruise was quite entertaining.’
‘Does she? I’m glad. I enjoyed most of it, but I’m surprised she didn’t take against it after what happened to her.’
‘She’s tough,’ said Max with a smile in his voice. ‘Will you come down here?’
‘Thank you, Max; I’d love to. Have you got troops of people staying at the moment or could I come right away? Connie wanted the article tomorrow and I just can’t get it right. I don’t want her to see it in this state.’
‘Are you frightened of her?’ Max’s penetrating question made Ming laugh.
‘No,’ she said firmly, lying. ‘But I don’t want her to have to be kind about this – and she’s far too kind to be honest. I need an honest opinion. Will you give it to me?’
‘Yes,’ he said, sounding absolutely serious for once. ‘I can certainly promise to do that. Look, why not drive down now and stay overnight. That way we’ll have plenty of time to get your article right and you can give it to her yourself when she comes here tomorrow morning.’
‘May I really? That’s sweet of you. I’ll see you in a couple of hours then.’
‘Drive carefully.’
‘I will.’ Ming put down the telephone and went to pack an overnight bag.
Max lived in a small seventeenth-century cottage on the estate near Etchingham in Sussex that Connie had inherited on her elder sister’s death. Taxes and Diana’s huge bequest to Peter Suvarov had ensured that the big house and most of the land had had to be let, but Connie had kept the Dower House, in which she and her sister had lived during the war when the big house was requisitioned, several cottages and enough land for a market garden. That was run for her by a young graduate of Cirencester agricultural college who was by inclination a botanist. Connie took a considerable interest in his work and together they experimented with unusual fruit and vegetables and new varieties of the more familiar sort.
Ming reached the small estate after a slow crawl through the traffic that was leaving London for the south coast, and drove past the impeccably tidy rows of vegetables and salads to Max’s cottage. When she knocked on the plain wooden front door, he flung it open and held out his hand to her.
He was a thin man of about fifty with a clever, serious face. Someone who did not know him might have put him down as a don were it not for the indefinable style of his shabby, well-cut clothes and an equally indescribable sense of withdrawal in him. His fine-featured face was lined and his light blue eyes could look as cold as steel when he was angry. Seeing Ming, they warmed and brightened.
‘I’ve been so dull,’ he confided as he ushered her into the drawing room. ‘It’s wonderful to see you. Connie’s been away in London and won’t be back until tomorrow and I’ve been working so hard I’m cross-eyed. Come on in.’
Ming stood in the doorway entranced. The drawing room was long and, despite its low ceiling and mullioned windows, it seemed to be filled with light, which fell on bowls of flowers, piles of typescript, stacks of magazines, pictures, old tapestry cushions and bits of Connie’s huge collection of antique Delftware. Fires burned at both ends of the room and scented it with woodsmoke and warm ash.
Apart from various chairs and sofas swathed in pale loose-covers, the furniture was mostly well-polished oak. There was an oval gate-legged table at one end, at which Max had obviously been working. Two pewter candlesticks and a blue-and-white bowl of late narcissi had been pushed to the farther edge, and his spectacles lay beside a neat heap of annotated typescript.
Oak bookshelves lined the walls between the windows and a variety of small coffers did duty as occasional tables and as supports for piles of books. What little could be seen of the walls was white, as were the plain cotton rep curtains, but the window-seats were upholstered in Delft blue and there was a variety of old rugs in different purplish-red tones on the polished floor.
It was a chaotic room but full of glorious things, and Ming felt immediately at ease in it.
‘How lovely!’ she said.
Max turned, pushing his grey hair away from his face, and smiled at her.
‘I’d forgotten that you hadn’t seen it before. It is nice … but hellishly lonely sometimes.’
‘Poor Max,’ said Ming, wondering why he did not live in London.
‘Would you like a drink?’ he asked.
‘I’d rather talk to you about this wretched article first,’ she answered, and he laughed.
‘Don’t worry so much,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you something to drink while I read it. It’ll take me a minute or two to do that anyway. What would you like? What about sherry? It’s nice and dry.’
‘All right. Thank you.’
She drank it sitting in the corner of a sofa near one of the fires while Max read her work at the table. He seemed to take ages and Ming could not help listening for sighs of boredom or despair. She felt like a child waiting for a vaccination.
At last Max pushed back his chair. Ming got up from the sofa, but he made her sit down again and came to sit beside her, his spectacles pushed up on to his high forehead.
‘You’re right,’ he said calmly. ‘It won’t do like this.’
‘No, no. I realise that,’ said Ming, her tongue tripping over the words in her haste to assure him that she had no inflated ideas of her own competence.
‘Calm down. It won’t do, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t change it. You were too tense when you wrote it. It reads as though you were writing a … oh, I don’t know: Perhaps a report for a sanitary inspector.’
‘Thanks!’ said Ming, regaining some of her sense of humour. Max grinned at her.
‘That’s better. After we’ve had lunch I’ll bring down my typewriter for you to have another go. If I explain exactly what I want, will you try?’
Ming waited a moment before she agreed, and then after they had eaten a simple cold lunch, she did her best to carry out his instructions. She found it very difficult and wasted sheet after sheet of paper before she was prepared to let him see any of it.
He had shut the white curtains by then and switched on the lamps, before piling more logs on each of the fires. While he read, she walked up and down the long room, alternately rolling and stretching her shoulders to ease the stiffness out of them.
‘Much better,’ said Max after a while.
Ming breathed deeply, as though she had just swum forty feet under water.
‘Really very much better. You need to do a bit more to this description of the egrets at Kom Ombo. Otherwise, apart from a little tidying up here and there, it’ll do.’ He smiled at her eager face. ‘I like the old man in the high-heeled shoes.’
‘I’m glad,’ said Ming. ‘Thank you for helping me, Max. I’d never have done it without you.’
‘Well, it’s not quite done yet,’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘Why don’t you finish it now and I’ll vanish into the kitchen to do something about supper for us.’
‘Now, Max? You’re a slave driver!’ Ming’s tone of voice was light, but it carried a genuine protest. She felt as though exhaustion had drained most of the blood out of her body, but she did what he wanted and was rewarded with both praise and a dish of superb osso bucco.
‘So what’s next?’ said Max, piling up their plates and offering Ming cheese and wrinkled apples.
‘Next?’ she asked, looking up from the apple she was peeling. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Didn’t Connie talk to you about the next issue and what you might write for that?’
‘No,’ said Ming, her face pink with pleasure. ‘No, she only asked me to do the Egypt piece. Do you mean that you think I …?’
‘Yes. Connie does too. Even before you went on your trip she was talking about getting you to do something for us. You’d better stay on for tomorrow’s editorial conference,’ said Max with a smile that disconcerted Ming.
‘That sounds a bit above my station.’ She cut a piece out of her neatly peeled apple and began to eat.
‘Not a bit. It’s just Connie and me and a pot of coffee at eleven o’clock. Do stay. We need a fresh eye.’
‘That’s very kind of you, Max. Thank you.’
When she had finished the apple and complimented him on the osso bucco, which he had cooked quite as well as Flixe would have done, Ming asked Max how he and Connie had come to set up the magazine.
He looked at her with such a sardonic lift of his dark eyebrows that she realised she had broken some unspoken rule.
‘It was an idle question,’ she said quickly. ‘I wasn’t trying to pry into your friendship.’
Her innocent face and dark blue eyes looked so worried that he believed her and answered more fully with less implied reproof than he would otherwise have done.
‘She was a friend of my wife,’ he said, surprising Ming, who knew nothing of any wife, ‘and she felt responsible for what happened – unnecessarily in my view – and once it was all over, she set about housing me and finding me something to do. I needed her help too much to reject it.’
‘Oh,’ said Ming, riven with curiosity but quite unable to ask any of the questions. Her mind ranged over car crashes, love affairs, suicide and all sorts of melodramas. Knowing that she could never ask Connie if she felt responsible for whatever happened, Ming thought of Peter Suvarov, who always knew everything about everyone and could sometimes be persuaded to tell it.
Max watched her and wondered whether she could possibly not have known his history. Aware that he was still morbidly sensitive, he found it hard to believe that anyone could have missed the newspaper reports and the subsequent gossip. On the other hand he knew Ming to be honest and too gentle for her own good and he had been horribly surprised that she should have asked such a question.
Chapter Four
Connie arrived at precisely eleven the next morning, by which time Ming and Max had breakfasted and read through some of the immense bundle of newspapers and periodicals he had had delivered. Ming had been accustomed to reading the bulk of the serious press for Roger Sillhorne and marking anything he might need to know, but she had never seen such a range of trivial and highly specialised periodicals as the ones that Max took. Since she had also read through several back issues of his own magazine before she went to sleep the night before, she felt almost drunk with words and took a moment to focus on Connie’s tall figure in the doorway. Max stood up at once, saying that he would make the coffee.
Although she was dressed in a comfortable old tweed skirt and a dark green twin-set, Connie had obviously had a new perm while she was in London and the shape of her hair did something to disguise the yellowing bruise that surrounded the cut on her forehead.
‘How good to see you, Ming! How’s the piece on Egypt coming along?’
‘Finished at last. Max lashed me all yesterday to have it rewritten for today,’ said Ming. ‘He’s asked me to sit in on your editorial meeting, but I really don’t want to get in the way.’
‘You won’t,’ said Connie briefly. She looked at Ming with a kind of helplessness that was quite foreign to her and added: ‘It’ll be good to have someone as a buffer to stop me telling Max how near the brink we are.’
‘I don’t understand. I thought people spoke very well of the magazine.’
‘They do.’ Connie’s mouth twisted. ‘But admiration doesn’t pay the printer. We’re not selling nearly as many copies as I’d expected and it’s all costing more than I had planned. I simply can’t afford to keep the magazine going for much longer than two or three more issues unless we can bring in more from subscriptions and the advertisers.’
She suddenly gripped the bridge of her nose as though she had a bad headache. Ming waited, not sure whether to offer comfort or comment, or just keep quiet.
‘And I need to keep it going,’ said Connie when she looked up again.
Ming wondered why. Connie had plenty of other things to do and her interest in the magazine was clearly not profit. She breathed carefully as though to quell a rising panic.
‘Don’t tell Max. I don’t want him to have to worry about it, since there’s nothing he can do. I’ll tell him that we need you because you’re just the age we’re aiming at. In fact you would be the ideal person to persuade your contemporaries to take the magazine. Might you be prepared to try to drum up subscriptions for us?’
‘Yes,’ said Ming, almost before she had thought about it. Selling Connie’s magazine seemed a more alluring prospect than standing in the street selling flags for a charity or getting up bazaars for her mother’s friends, which were the only other jobs she had been offered.
‘We can’t pay you much,’ Connie began, but Ming interrupted her before she had a chance to finish her sentence.
‘Don’t worry about that. I’ve got Anna Kingsley’s money, which is far more than I need, and you clearly need all yours at the moment.’
‘You are sweet,’ said Connie.
Ming smiled and straightened her shoulders. ‘Then I’ll do whatever I can for whatever you can afford to pay me for the moment and then if the circulation improves, you can pay me more and perhaps I could even put in a bit of capital. If things don’t get any better, you can wash out any idea of owing me anything.’
